Prescriptive and descriptive linguistics

The sci.lang FAQ does not equivocate:

3 Does linguistics tell people how to
speak or write properly?

No. Linguistics is descriptive, not prescriptive.

As we'll see, linguistics can certainly be used prescriptively, and often
is. However, modern linguists insist that value judgments about language
should be recognized as such, and should be examined in the light of the
facts. As a result, some critics feel that linguists' attitudes stand
in the way of the establishment and maintenance of language standards.
You can find a sample of the debate in Geoff Nunberg's classic article
Decline
of Grammar , or Mark Halpern's more recent riposte A
War That Never Ends .

Negotiating a truce

There are genuine differences of opinion about language policy. Linguistic
analysis lets us state the issues clearly -- when this is done, people
sometimes disagree less than they thought they did about "correctness"
in English.

In particular, we can distinguish four types of "correctness":

Established criteria of educated written
language

third-person singular /s/: "she goes," not "she go."

no double negatives: "he didn't see anybody," not "he didn't see
nobody."

complete sentences

Issues on which educated people differ (and which may be different
in written and spoken forms):

"who/whom did you see"

"Winston tastes good like/as a cigarette should"

"the data is/are unreliable"

"I disapprove of him/his doing it"

"get it done as quick/quickly as possible"

"hopefully, she'll be there on time"

Changes in the spoken language that some people resist:

"between you and I"

"me and Harry went downtown"

"was" for "said"

Pure inventions of self-appointed grammarians with no basis in actual
usage:

prohibition of dangling prepositions

"I shall" vs. "you will"

"It is I"

prohibition of split infinitives

There is a range of attitudes about "correctness" among the world's languages,
from unconstrained vernacular evolution to maximal standardization and
codification:

Pidgins and creoles (Crystal, p. 336-341), which develop rapidly
among speakers who need a new common language -- for instance:

Haitian Creole (6+ million speakers in Haiti and New York City)

Tok Pisin (2 million speakers in Papua New Guinea)

Jamaican Creole or Patois (2 million speakers)

Hawaiian Creole (1/2 million speakers)

Palenquero (3,000 speakers in Columbia)

Unwritten languages -- or languages where writing is hardly ever
used -- whose form is set by spoken interaction only:

Ilocano (5.3 million speakers, Philippines)

Chagga (800,000 speakers, Tanzania)

Buang (10,000 speakers, Papua New Guinea)

Written languages with no academies -- for instance

English (400 million speakers)

Marathi (65 million speakers)

Languages with academies

French (109 million speakers; academy established 1635)

Spanish (266 million speakers; academy established 1713)

Hungarian (14.4 million speakers; academy established 1830)

Hebrew (2.7 million speakers; academy established 1953)

Languages codified to preserve an archaic form, for instance:

Latin

Old Church Slavonic

Sanskrit

Language preservation

The roots of linguistics are actually to be found in the needs of the
last two, most prescriptive, categories of "correctness" cited
above. Linguists have been involved for several millenia in the codification
and preservation of languages, and we have learned a few lessons in the
process.

The first linguist whose work has come down to us is Panini, an Indian
grammarian of the fifth or sixth century B.C. We have some dictionary
fragments and grammar lessons from a thousand years earlier, when Sumerian
was being preserved as a literary and religious language.

Panini's grammar contained more than 4,000 rules, which were memorized
in spoken form only, and were not written down until several hundred years
after his death. The purpose of his grammar was to preserve knowledge
of the language of the Hindu religious canon. In Panini's time,
the ordinary language of the people had changed so much (since the composition
of works like the Vedas) that correct recitation and understanding of
the sacred works could not be assured without explicit study. For more
information about the linguistic situation of Panini's time, consult this
link to a paper on Peoples
and languages of the pre-Islamic Indus valley.

A few quotes from this paper are instructive:

Sanskrit became the elitist language of the Indus
Valley from about 1000 B.C and remained in use in some domain or the
other, generally religion and the state, till the Muslim conquest
... The Rigveda itself gives importance to language which is personified
as a goddess. In Esa Itkonen's translation it glorifies itself as follows:

I gave birth to the father on the head of this
world. My womb is in the waters, within the ocean. From there I spread
out over all creatures and touch the sky with the crown of my head.

I am the one who blows like the wind, embracing
all creatures. Beyond the sky, beyond this earth, so much have I become
in my greatness.

Language was sacred and change was seen as corruption.
But all living languages change and the spoken languages of the people,
the Prakrits, changed all the time. This threat was countered by making
grammatical rules which would petrify language. The most well known
of this set of rules was made by the great grammarian Panini ... So
sacred was the language of the religious texts, Sanskrit, that the grammar
itself acquired a central and almost sacrosanct place in the education
system of the Indus Valley Aryans. . .

In all probability the Indo-Aryans did not speak
one uniformly standardized language but mutually intelligible non-standardized
dialects. The process of standardization must have been started by the
Brahmins earlier but Panini perfected it ... so that this polished (samskrita)
language did not change and was considered superior to the ever-changing
dialects which were spoken by the people. As the elite looked down upon
the uneducated people, it also held their languages in contempt. Thus
the Prakrits were a sign of rusticity and illiteracy as the languages
of the ordinary people are even nowadays. But the term prakrriti means
'root' or 'basis' according to Katre who suggests that they existed
when Sanskrit was standardized. . .

According to George Grierson the Primary Prakrits
were living languages in Vedic days. Later they were also fixed by grammarians
who wrote their grammars and the living languages of the people were
called Secondary Prakrits or 'Sauraseni'. When even these were fossilized
by grammarians the Tertiary Prakrits or 'Apabhramasas' were born. By
1000 A.D even the tertiary Prakrits became dated and from this time
onward, as we shall see, the modern . . . vernaculars emerged.

The same sort of process has happened again and again throughout history,
in language after language.

The social dimension

The goals of the early grammarians (Crystal, p. 2) were

to codify the principles of languages, so as to show the system beneath
"the apparent chaos of usage"

to provide a means of settling disputes over usage

to "improve" the language by pointing out common errors

The prescriptive agenda almost always has an aspect of social gatekeeping.
In this role, arbitrary features of language are used to block social
advancement, to put people in their place or to keep them there.

In the England of a half-century ago, membership in the upper class was
signaled by subtleties of vocabulary choice that S.
C. Ross called "U and non-U," for "upper class" and "non-upper class"
(Crystal, p. 39). Here are a few of the thousands of distinctions in question:

U

Non-U

looking-glass

mirror

have a bath

take a bath

sick

ill

rich

wealthy

wireless

radio

A clever parvenu might conceivably learn to imitate "received pronunciation,"
as Eliza Doolittle did under the tutelage of Henry Higgins. However,
the only way to master every nuance of U vocabulary is to spend your life
with U people.

A literal (and fatal) example of language as gatekeeper is given in Judges
12:

4

Jephthah then called together
the men of Gilead and fought against Ephraim. TheGileadites
struck them down because the Ephraimites had said, "You Gileadites
are renegades from Ephraim and
Manasseh."

5

The Gileadites captured the
fords of the Jordan leading to Ephraim, and whenever a survivor
of Ephraim said, "Let me cross over," the men of Gilead asked him,
"Are you an Ephraimite?" If he replied, "No,"

6

they said, "All right, say
`Shibboleth.'" If he said, "Sibboleth," because he could not pronounce
the word correctly, they seized him and killed him at the fords
of the Jordan. Forty-two thousand Ephraimites were killed at that
time.

As a result of this story, we use the word "shibboleth" to mean an arbitrary
linguistic marker that distinguishes one group from another. A 20th-century
parallel to the Biblical shibboleth story took place in the Dominican
Republic in 1937, when tens of thousands of
Haitians were massacred on the basis of whether or not they could
roll the /r/ in the Spanish word for "parsley."

From diagnosis to prescription
It would be odd for a medical researcher to say "I'm not going to
tell you what you should do -- that would not be part of medical science
-- but I can offer you some statistics about the medical consequences of
eating tainted hamburger. You can decide for yourself whether you want to
get food poisoning, or not."

Why are most linguists reluctant to take the step from description to prescription?

The short answer is "because a social or regional dialect is not a medical
condition."

Communication disorders

In the case of genuine disorders of communication, where the medical
anology holds, there is no reluctance to give prescriptive advice, to
the extent that valid treatment is available.

There are disciplines allied to linguistics that specialize in the diagnosis
and treatment of language- and speech-related disorders. These are generally
known as Logopedics and
Phoniatrics in Europe and Japan, and go under various less obscure
names such as Communicative Disorders
in the United States. Linguists also cooperate with medical specialists
such neurologists and otolaryngologists to improve the basic understanding,
diagnosis and treatment of medical conditions involving speech and language.

In the case of a nodule on the vocal cords, or a brain injury, or a speech
defect such as stuttering, no one objects to moving from study and diagnosis
to advice and treatment.

Language change is not corruption

Language change is not "corruption" or "decay", but a natural and inevitable
process. Attempts to stop it lead to diglossia, a situation in
which formal and ordinary language get further and further apart, and
eventually split into two different languages. You can preserve the elite
language for a long time (there are still speakers of Sanskrit in modern
India), but you can't stop the process.

These facts don't tell us what values to have. We might decide that it
would be a good thing for a particular variety of English -- say the English
of Jane Austen, or the English of Theodore White -- to become an
unchanging language of formal discourse for the elite, like Latin in Medieval
Europe, with the language(s) of daily life despised as "vulgar tongues."
We might decide to prefer the existing gradual process of change in formal
English, in which one "standard" after another is defended and then abandoned.
We might even prefer the linguistic anarchy of Elizabethan England, where
people spoke, wrote (and spelled) English as they pleased, although they
applied strict formal guidelines to their Latin and Greek.

The fact is, it probably doesn't matter much what we want. The English
language is likely to go on in the future roughly as it has over the past
few hundred years, with a wide range of regional and social varieties,
and a more-or-less international formal standard, imposed by consensus
and changing gradually over time.

Standards: preservation or imagination?

In the debate about language standards, each of the several sides tends
to get annoyed about various failures and stupidities of the others. One
thing that gets linguists particularly cheesed off is bad scholarship
on the part of some language mavens, who pretend, without checking, that
a principle they just thought up is hallowed by centuries of the best
writers' usage, or is a necessary consequence of the fundamental laws
of logic. This what we identified earlier as level
4 on the "correctness" scale: pseudo-correctness.

If it turns out that Shakespeare or The New York Times routinely violates
the "rule" in question, the pretence is exposed. Linguists love this.

A particularly exuberant example of pedant-puncturing is provided by
Henry Churchyard's anti-pedantry
page, which systematically documents the use of "singular their" by
Jane Austen, one of the greatest prose stylists ever to compose an English
sentence. He includes a passage from Steven
Pinker on the same construction. Pinker argues that those who
fault "singular their" for violating the logic of grammatical agreement
have simply misunderstood the grammar of pronouns used with quantifiers
as antecedents.

What is "singular their"? It's the use of "they" or "their" in connection
with an indefinite third person antecedent.

Churchyard provides an example with a message:

it's time for anyone who still thinks that singular
"their" is so-called "bad grammar" to get rid of their prejudices and
pedantry!

He explains that this use of "their" dates back
to the 14th century, when the pronominal system of modern English was
first being formed. "Singular their" was first faulted (by a grammarian
applying mistaken analogies from Latin) in 1795, but continued to be used
by many respected writers up to the present day. Churchyard's argument
is essentially historical -- "singular their" has been a part of English
from the start, and the movement to exclude it is an artificial intrusion.
Churchyard's evidence is certainly impressive -- seldom has so massive
an apparatus of scholarship been deployed to rout the forces of pedantry.

Pinker
makes a different argument. He suggests that those who fault "singular
their" for violating the rules of grammatical agreement have wrongly analyzed
the grammar of the situation, or at least have mixed up two things that
need to be kept apart.

Some pronouns refer to determinate (if perhaps
imaginary) things: Ann, Sam's nightmares, the milky way. In this case,
pronouns naturally reflect the number of their referent. No one who knows
English would say "Kim hurt their hand," even if unsure whether Kim is
male or female.

Other pronouns don't really refer to anything at
all, but instead function like what logicians call "bound variables",
place holders in phrases that express relationships among sets of things.
For instance, when we say "every girl loves her mother,"
the pronoun her doesn't refer to any particular girl, but instead
helps to establish a certain relationship between girls and mothers, namely
that every girl has just one.

The grammar (and logic) of quantifiers like
"every" is actually quite subtle and difficult to get right. The ancient
Greek (and Roman) logicians (and grammarians) were not able to devise
a workable approach, nor were the logicans of Medieval Europe. The first
adequate quantificational logic was only devised about a century ago,
byGottloeb Frege and Bertrand Russell. They
were working on the foundations of mathematics; the relationship between
the grammar and the logic of quantificational expressions in natural languages
remains a topic of research to this day. So it's not surprising that a
language maven in 1795 (or 1997!) should assume an analysis of quantifiers
in English that is demonstrably wrong.

the colloquial their (a plural) doesn't agree
with the verb, and is not grammatically correct. We use this often in
speaking -- "a friend of mine called me." "What did they say?"
-- but, although many writers have used it (see examples from
Jane
Austen), it often makes for bad formal writing
today.

To read the whole of Lynch's commentary, look in his on-line notes under
"Sexist language and the indefinite third person."

Lynch's "Jane Austen" link connects to Churchyard's page, and he explicitly
concedes the historical point. He still believes in the agreement argument
-- his position seems to be that agreement failure is a complicated business,
but he knows it when he sees it. He may well be wrong, but at this point
we are putting one set of native-speaker intuitions (from Pinker and Churchyard)
up against another (from Lynch).

After two centuries of struggle, the anti-singular-their forces have
won the hearts and minds of an influential fraction of the population.
Thanks to Churchyard, Pinker and others, they can't get away with claiming
that "singular their" is an example of the decay of the English language,
or that it is a violation of the laws of logic.

Prohibition of "singular their" is an innovation, and both the logic
and the grammar behind it are shaky at best. However, one can grant these
points and still agree with Lynch that "it often makes for bad formal
writing today."

For Churchyard, this is a concession to stupidity. For Lynch, it is a
recognition of reality, and perhaps also an expression of his own taste.

But aren't these just mistakes?

Surely not every bugbear of the language mavens is an arbitrary prejudice
foisted on a credulous public.

Speakers and writers may use a completely inappropriate word that happens
to sound like the one they meant, or combine metaphors into phrases whose
literal meanings are ludicrous, or start with one cliche and end with
another, or otherwise use language badly.

There were tears strolling down their faces.
That is a mute point.
His views on that subject are always disconcerning.
It was a spur-of-the-cuff remark.
I may look calm, but beneath this cool exterior is a churning iceberg
ready to explode!

A new kind of example is created by computer spell-checkers and similar
programs. These examples are amusing in roughly the same way as the human
examples, and may arise for roughly similar reasons.

Do linguists defend these malefactors too?

No. Especially not the computers. A mistake is a mistake.

However, we should point out that mistakes of this kind often become
part of the language after a while. There are plenty of things in the
modern standard English that started out as malapropisms, and if we paid
attention to the source of every originally-metaphorical word, almost
every phrase could be criticized.

For instance, the the word "muscle" is from Latin musculus "little
mouse". If we kept this original meaning in mind, an expression like "put
some muscle into law enforcement" would seem pretty silly --- put a
small mouse into law enforcement -- Mickey or Minnie? In fact, the
expression is fine, because the etymology of the word "muscle" has entirely
faded out of our consciousness.

A problem arises when such changes are in progress. These cases are the
real stock in trade of the language mavens, who often give useful advice
about the status of one struggle or another in this arena .

A short historical list of obscure prescriptivist bugbears

Descriptive linguists like to poke fun at prescriptivists by citing some
historical objections that are hard to understand today. This is a bit
unfair, since of course the examples are selected from cases where complaint
and ridicule failed to stem the tide of change. One might also cite a
set of linguistic innovations that died out instead of taking over. On
the other hand, people generally feel compelled to speak out against a
particular usage just in case it is spreading.

For instance, in 1586, Angel Day ridiculed exasperate, egregious
and arcane as being "preposterous and confused."

Jonathan Swift, in 1710, objected to mob, operations, ambassadors,
communications, preliminaries and banter. Can you
figure out why?

See if you can determine what led a commentator in London to attack this
passage by Thomas Jefferson, from Notes on the State of Virginia,
as "degraded" and "vicious" in its misuse of the English
language:

I only mean to suggest a doubt, whether the bulk
and faculties of animals depend on the side of the Atlantic on which
their food happens to grow, or which furnishes the elements of
which they are compounded? [. . .] I am induced to suspect, there has
been more eloquence than sound reasoning displayed in support of this
theory; that it is one of those cases where the judgment has been seduced
by a glowing pen: and whilst I render every tribute of honor and esteem
to the celebrated Zoologist, who has added, and is still adding, so
many precious things to the treasures of science, I must doubt whether
in this instance he has not cherished error also, by lending her for
a moment his vivid imagination and bewitching language.

So far the Count de Buffon has carried this new
theory of the tendency of nature to belittle her productions on this
side of the Atlantic. Its application to the race of whites, transplanted
from Europe, remained for the Abbe Raynal.

If you're like most modern readers, it will surprise
you that the complaint should have focused on belittle,
which was viewed as a barbarous American coinage. Jefferson's use in this
passage is the earliest citation given in the Oxford English Dictionary.

In 1785, James Beattie objected vehemently to the use of reform
for reformation, approval for approbation,novel
for new, existence for life, and capture for
take militarily.

In 1837, the Englishman Captain Frederick Marryat ridiculed American
usage of fix for prepare, stoop for porch,
great for splendid, right away for at once,
and strike for attack.

In books like Words and Their Uses(1870) and Everyday
English (1880), Richard Grant White objected to "words that are
not words, ... a cause of great discomfort to all right thinking, straightforward
people." His examples include reliable, telegraph, donate,
jeopardize and gubernatorial.

White also objects to words that are really words, but are "constantly
abused":

Good

Bad

Comments

pitcher

jug

remainder

balance

overtake

catch

earth

dirt

"dirt means filth, and primarily
filth of the most offensive kind."

leading article

editorial

wharf

dock

"docks must be covered"

send

transmit

oversee

supervise

condemn

repudiate

home

residence

recover

recuperate

killed

executed

"a perversion"

settle

locate

"insufferable"

convince

persuade

"vulgar"

good

splendid

"coarse"

jewels

jewelry

"of very low caste"

iced cream

ice cream

?

caption

"laughable and absurd"

Note that Marryat and White, only 33 years apart though on opposite
sides of the Atlantic, are on opposite sides with respect to the use of
"spendid."

It is not only the prescriptivists of earlier centuries
whose concerns sometimes seem obscure to us today. For instance, within
the past generation, the language maven Edwin Newman has diagnosed a problem
with sentences like this:

After the nature of Mr. Smith's illness
was determined by a team of neurologists, he was hospitalized for an additional
week of tests.

It might be "blight, bloat, illiteracy, disrepect for language, misspelling,
comma faults, dangling participles, or flagrant propaganda" -- these are
the sins that Newman announces he is campaigning against. Can you tell
what the problem is in this case? The answer is the use of a word formed
with the affix -ize, which Newman thinks is ugly. Prioritize
and personalize are also stigmatized for him.

How about this sentence, in which Newman finds a different but equally
serious fault:

Ervin was aided by Paul Verkuil, a
professor at the University of North Carolina, in gathering the evidence
that convinced Congress to adopt the provision.

The answer? "You may convince that. You may convince of.
You may not convince to."

One last Newmanity:

The government admits to more than
300 dead, giving a "body count" of 225 rebels, about 50 civilians, and
only 29 of its own troops.

What's the problem here? "When -- and more to the point, why -- did a
troop become the same thing as a soldier? A troop is a body of men. Tear
those patches off your sashes, all you Girl Scout troops. And never mind
the American Heritage Dictionary's permissive third entry: Military
units, soldiers.' "

The case of the disappearing endings

Richard Faust, in Columbia Magazine, 11/83, points out that there is
a historical tendency for the -ed ending to drop in commonly-used
terms that start out as phrases of the form Verb-ed Noun:

Newer (reduced) Form

Older Form

skim milk

skimmed milk

popcorn

popped corn

roast beef

roasted beef

wax paper

waxed paper

ice cream

iced cream

ice tea

iced tea

shave ice (Hawaian dessert)

shaved ice (?)

cream corn (informal)

creamed corn

whip cream (informal)

whipped cream

Bilingualism, stigmatized dialects and linguistic nationalism

Linguistic prescriptivism often takes on shades of nationalism as well
as morality. In 1926, the National Council of Teachers of English urged
its members to have their children recite this Better Speech Week Pledge:

I love the United States of America.
I love my country's flag. I love my country's language. I promise:

That I will not dishonor my
country's speech by leaving off the last syllable of words.

That I will say a good American
"yes" and "no" in place of an Indian grunt "um-hum" and "nup-um" or
a foreign "ya" or "yeh" and "nope."

That I will do my best to improve
American speech by avoiding loud rough tones, by enunciating distinctly,
and by speaking pleasantly, clearly and sincerely.

Feelings sometimes run a bit high about standards of English usage, but
there are real language wars out there, that tear countries apart.
The Ephraimites died over the pronunciation of /s/ -- when completely
different languages are in contact, it's even easier to make linguistic
differences a point of conflict. We'll take this topic up in detail
later in the course. For some echoes of the current topic, read a
recent essay by Bob King on the Official English movement.